iPhone app without using Interface Builder

Question

Is there any reason to not write iphone apps without useing the interface builder?

(or in other words, is it ok to write apps without the builder?)

Answer 1

I've never written an iPhone app that uses Interface Builder (.xib files), but that's just personal taste: I like applications to be 100% code.

The reason is that I don't like applications that require design-time tools if you need to change something later on. It creates a dependency that may not be a problem today or next month, but it can become a problem in 3 years time.

So, the answer is: yes, it's fine to write iPhone apps without using Interface Builder.

Answer 2

Sure, it's absolutely fine to write apps without IB. It takes a little bit more setup (I believe there are some modifications you have to make to your Info.plist file), but it's certainly possible, and people do it all the time.

Personally, I prefer using Interface Builder for most tasks, but usually just to get the basic layout in place (so I don't have to deal with calculating rects, etc). Any further customization I prefer to do in code.

Answer 3

You can edit .XIB files by hand if you want to. They're XML, after all. Can't help having at least one of them in the project. Alternatively, you can create all your controls from code. The latter takes less typing, as far as I can tell.

Then, there are some apps where a XIB file would be of no use. I'm talking about games, where artistic/design considerations beat the convenience of having native widgets.

So yes, it's OK on both design level (no native widgets) and implementation level (yes native widgets, but sans IB).

Answer 4

Personally, my applications use no NIBs within them, but that's more of a matter of how I started doing development than anything else. I transitioned over from doing Mac development (where I use Interface Builder almost every day) to iPhone from when the first beta SDKs were released. Initially, there was no Interface Builder, and even when it came you couldn't do a lot of things with it, so I never took the time to really get to know it on the iPhone. It's more a matter of me doing what I'm familiar with.

Jeff LaMarche makes a convincing argument in his article "Don't Fear the Interface Builder" for you to use Interface Builder wherever you can, and I encourage new developers to learn to use it first before dropping down to programmatic user interface generation. It saves you a tremendous amount of time for interfaces using standard elements.

Some people have argued that there is a performance benefit to be had using purely programmatic interfaces, but Matt Gallagher ran a series of benchmarks and found that this speedup is only typically on the order of 5-10%. If you really want to shave that last bit off of your application's startup time, you might be able to have the best of both worlds with Adrian Kosmaczewski's nib2objc, which generates Objective-C from your NIB files.

However, there are plenty of times that you'll need to manipulate interfaces programmatically, such as for custom views and animations. This code can exist in parallel with Interface Builder without too much confusion. Again, it's more of a matter of personal preference at this point, but my recommendation is to use Interface Builder due to the time it can save you.